My last few posts have been on some examples of dubious scientific publications. Some publishers are bad actors. Some authors are naively over-confident and have found naive editors or publishers to match. Sometimes it can be hard to tell. The last case I'm going to look at here is perhaps the worst situation - where the authors are clearly behaving badly, and somehow made it through some form of peer review. This is the sort of thing that gets reported regularly on Retraction Watch, and also similar to the Gerlich and Tscheuschner case except that the journal in question is slightly more prestigious (G&T's journal, IJMP-B, has an impact factor of less than 0.5). And once again the topic is climate change.

At first sight this article isn't as obviously nutty as some of those I've discussed here previously - the graphics and tables seem to be well designed, the reference section looks fairly substantive. The mathematics is once again pure algebra with not a sign of an understanding of the calculus invented by Newton and Leibniz a few hundred years back - and we'll get back to that. But other than the overly simplistic math, the paper may not strike the experienced editor immediately as absurd.

On what I believe is a private discussion site I was asked a number of questions about the climate problem. I'm copying my answers here (with some minor corrections of typos and for context) as they may be found helpful for others... or at least as a reminder to myself of what I know.

Q. 1 "I look forward to any insight you can provide into the real verifiable evidence of the human footprint."

A. 1
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "verifiable evidence". You acknowledge climate seems to be changing. There are two distinct pieces of knowledge that go into "blaming" it on us humans, each of which has been substantiated from multiple observations and physical understanding. These are:

(1) Humans have caused atmospheric CO2 levels to increase considerably over the past century. This youtube video shows the wide range of observations of that increase in considerable detail, also showing how it compares with past changes:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2mZyCblxS4